Spaceship Speed Chart

[Batman]

Are we ever actually told the distances involved? Crossing from one galaxy to another is moderately meaningless if you don't know how far they're apart.

[NecronLord]

As I recall they stated on screen many times it was 'The Milky Way, Andromeda and Triangulum' which naturally, we know the positions of.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Indeed. Though if you want a better "average" speed you can use the case when Andromeda had to limp back from M81 after encountering the Magog Worldship. Took her 12-13 months wandering the slipstream until she reached friendly space. ~11 million ly in 12 months, and that's without an organic pilot so she could only ever make 50/50 choices while piloting.

[wautd]

I expected Spaceball 1 to be the fasted. What with being able to go at ludicrous speed and all.

[Q99]

For FTL ships, Culture ships are pretty up there. While they cruise at tens or hundreds of thousands of C, they can also redline their engines to hit many orders of magnitude more for short bursts.

Known Space ships are impressive- IIrc, Kzinti ships could hit 0.8c with reactionless drives in short order.

[Jub]

The Culture does need to use the grid though and that means that they can get some paces faster than others.

[Terralthra]

I don't think the grid in the Cultureverse means what you think it means. It isn't like Tron.

[Jub]

I don't think the grid in the Cultureverse means what you think it means. It isn't like Tron.

Then why in 'Player of Games' did it take so long to get Gurgeh out to Empire of Azad? It was specifically mentioned that it took longer to get out there than to cross the same distance to someplace else.

[Q99]

Most places it's roughly the same speed. The difference is the presence of mass or not- outside the galaxy it's slower, in the galaxy it's faster.

[Terralthra]

Most places it's roughly the same speed. The difference is the presence of mass or not- outside the galaxy it's slower, in the galaxy it's faster.

Correct. The grid is the energy layer between nested expanded universes, and is denser where more matter exists, more tenuous at the tips of the spiral arms or in the Magellanic clouds. It isn't a literal grid on which Culture ships can travel, off of which they can't travel. If I recall, though, at least as much of the journey time was because there was indirect routing involved. The Limiting Factor was not nearly as fast as the Little Rascal. Had he been aboard the Little Rascal the whole way on a direct path from Chiark to Ea, it probably wouldn't have taken as long.

You're correct, Jub, in that it does affect travel time.

[The_Saint]

I'd be curious to see where a Xeelee nightfighter sits on the scale if anyone has any ideas...

[Starglider]

I'd be curious to see where a Xeelee nightfighter sits on the scale if anyone has any ideas...

It is off the scale. The FTL is an instantaneous jump, limited only by (minimal) compute time, and the Xeelee use time travel as necessary to get assets into the right place at the right time. The reactionless drive goes from relative stop to high-relativistic velocities in seconds and has sufficient thrust to hover in close proximity to a neutron star. Technology in the Xeelee Sequence doesn't have the same narrative purpose as typical sci-fi ships, it is a conceptual exploration of the limits of the possible while staying relatively close to known cosmology & physics.

[Q99]

I'm surprised more stuff doesn't do instant place-to-place.


Well, I guess a fair amount does, but only over short range (Battletech FTL is instant, but iirc has a max range of 20ly and looong recharge times).

[LaCroix]

I'm surprised more stuff doesn't do instant place-to-place.


Well, I guess a fair amount does, but only over short range (Battletech FTL is instant, but iirc has a max range of 20ly and looong recharge times).

Actually, it has a jump time measured in seconds (from 15 to 90), though feels like being instant - Battletech astrobooks go into that issue. Range is 30ly.
It takes abouit a week to recharge on solar power, or can be recharged pretty fast using the engine or by microwave or direct transmissions if there is a station with batteries available.

This is done at risk of burning out the capacitors if done too quickly, but it can recharge within anything down to a hour (with 150 (beamed) and 100 (direct dock) hours being the safe minimum)

But with current rules, they can jump 2 times with a charged core, or 6 times if they have an additional battery strapped to the core.

So effectively, a perfectly designed BT Jumpship can jump 180 ly in roughly 36 minutes (~300ly/h - 2.63 million c), including drive ramp up for each jump. Of that, 90 seconds would be actual travel time (1200ly/h - 10.5 million C).

Note: Old rules would mean just one jump of 30ly, but speed would be the same.

tldr; Within 30light years, it's as fast as a Star Destroyer, or even as fast as the Millenium Falcon, counting only the time in transit.

[Andras]

Lens-verse;
Typical cruiser tops out at 150parsec/hour, or roughly 4.3million C
A speedster hits 3x that (450parsec/hr)

In inter-galactic space, 100,000 parsec/hr (~2.9e9c)

[Alyrium Denryle]

I was expecting the Planet Express ship (or should that be class, since there was a previous one as well) to be near the top, since it can do that whole "see the edge of the Universe in a morning" thing.

I hadn't expected the Daedalus from Stargate to be so damn fast. Presumably this is when they have the ZPM plugged in and do the Earth-Atlantis run in 4 days. Of course, you then have the Asgard ships themselves who can do that run in minutes if they want to.

Also kinda curious how they got such a high "speed" for the Galactica, since that moves in a series of instant jumps rather than continuous travel. Must be time-averaged or something, though I can't recall any stated distances in the show.

Hell, sublight acceleration in the stargate universe is also ridiculous, at least on a straight line. When that recall device happened on the X301, if we go with minimum distance to Jupiter (588 million km), 5 minutes until they stopped accelerating, and a travel time to jupiter of 24 hours, we are talking somewhere on the order of 4600 Gs. I assume the do less in combat for reasons of being able to actually comprehend what they are doing, but still....

[Batman]

You're working with a different definition of 'ridiculous' than I am. I grew up with the Perryverse. 5 to low end 6 figure g accelerations are 'normal' for me.

[Alyrium Denryle]

You're working with a different definition of 'ridiculous' than I am. I grew up with the Perryverse. 5 to low end 6 figure g accelerations are 'normal' for me.

While that might be the case, humans in the stargate universe went from "having reinvent lunar launch vehicles" to "can reach jupiter in less than a day" in something like 3 years, and less than 4 years after that they were at "regular intergalactic travel".

Their prototype battecruiser had sublight engines that could reach targets .38 light years away in 4-5 months (they were rounding while speaking) and would have to actually deal with significant time dilation effects. This heavily implies that they consider their acceleration time largely irrelevant. Afterall, a few hours give or take dont really matter...

[Andras]

*cough* Skylark */cough*

Lensverse is toned down from Skylark.

At the end of Skylark, the bad guy decides he's going to run off to the galaxy at the farthest end of the universe to start his empire because Earth is wimpy.

Spoiler

This course, which would give the
First Galaxy a near miss, was the most direct route to a galaxy that
was distant indeed; the galaxy lying on the extreme southern rim of
the First Universe; the galaxy in which the DQ had been built; the
galaxy that DuQuesne had surveyed so thoroughly and which he
intended to rule.
DuQuesne and Stephanie were in the DQ's control room, which was
an exact duplicate of the Skylark of Valeron's. He placed her in the
seat that on the Valeron was Crane's, showed her how to elevate
herself into his own station.
"Oh," she said. "You're going to give me the whole gigantic Brain?"
"That's the best and easiest way to do it. I boiled down about ten
thousand lifetimes of knowledge and experience into ten half-hour
sessions. The ten tapes on that player there are coded instructions
for the Brain-what to give you and how. There are minds who could
take the whole jolt in seconds, but yours and mine aren't that type-yet.
But you'll get it all in five hours. Every detail. It'll shock you all hell's
worth and it'll scare you right out of your panties, but it won't hurt you
and it won't damage your brain. Yours is one of the very few human
brains that can take it. I'll start it and in five hours I'll be back.
Ready?"
"As much so as I ever will be, I guess. Go."
He started the player; and, after waiting a few minutes to be sure that
everything was going as programmed, he left the room...
He came back in just as the machine clicked off, lowered her "chair,"
and lifted her to her feet. "Good-God-In-Heaven!" she gasped. Her
skin, normally so dark, was a yellowish white; so pate that her
scattered freckles stood out sharply, each one in bold relief. "I don't...
I can't... I simply can't grasp it! I know that I know it, but..." She
paused.
He shook his head in sympathy. Which, for Marc C. DuQuesne, was
a rare gesture indeed. "I know. I couldn't tell you what it would be like
no possible warning can be enough. But that's the bare minimum
you'll have to start with, and it won't take you very long to assimilate it
all. Ready for some talk?"
"Not only ready, I'm eager. First, though, I want to give you a vote of
full confidence. I'm sure that you'll succeed in everything you try from
now on; even to becoming Emperor Marc the First of some empire."
"Huh? Where did you get that?"
"By reading between the lines. Do you think I'm stupid, is that why
you gave me all this?"
"Okay. You've always known, as an empirical, non-germane fact, that
the Earth and all it carries isn't even a flyspeck in a galaxy, to say
nothing of a universe; but now you know and really understand just
how little it actually does amount to."
She shuddered. "Yes. It's... it's appalling."
"Not when viewed in the proper perspective. I set out to rule Earth,
yes; but after I began to learn something I lost that idea in a hurry. For
a long time now I haven't wanted Earth or any part of it. Its medical
science is dedicated whole-heartedly to the deterioration of the
human race by devoting its every effort to the preservation of the
lives of the unfit. In Earth's wars its best men-its best breeding stockare
killed. Earth simply is not, worth saving even if it could be saved;
which I doubt. Neither is Norlamin. Not because its conquest is at
present impossible, but because the Norlaminians aren't worth
anything, either. All they do -all they can do-is think. They haven't
done anything constructive in their entire history and they never will.
They're such bred-in-the-bone pacifists-look at the way the damned
sissies acted in this Chloran thing-that it is psychologically
impossible for any one of them to pull a trigger. No; Sleemet had the
right idea. And Ravindauyou have him in mind?"
"Vividly. Preserve the race-in his way and on his terms."
"You're a precisionist; that's my idea exactly. To pick out a few
hundred people-we won't need many, as there are billions already
where we're going-as much as possible like us, and build a
civilization that will be what a civilization ought to be."
The girl gasped, but her eyes began to sparkle. "'In a distant galaxy',
as Ravindau said?"
"Very distant. Clear out on the rim of this universe. The last galaxy
out on the rim, in fact; five degrees east of Universal south."